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The Last Mountain is a documentary about Mountain Top Removal, and its negative impact on the communities of the Coal River Valley in West Virginia. For anyone who hasn’t heard of Mountain Top Removal is a form of surface mining that involves the mining of the summit of a mountain. The coal seams are extracted from a mountain by removing the overburden, above the seams. Explosives are used to remove up to 400 vertical feet of mountain to expose underlying coal seams.The land may be dumped back on the ridge and constructed in order to reflect the approximate original shaping of the mountain. Excess rock and soil laden with toxic mining byproducts are often dumped into nearby valleys, in what are called “holler fills” or “valley fills.” It is the main method of coal mining in the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States.

The documentary reflects on how this method is destructive to the land, air, water and over…

The fact that Arlington’s water comes from the Potomac River is a no-brainer. The river is the largest body of water bordering Arlington, and the largest body around until the river reaches the Chesapeake Bay one hundred miles downstream. Specifically, our water comes from the Dalecarlia Reservoir across the Potomac on the border between D.C. and Bethesda, which is maintained by a division of the Army Corps of Engineers.

This is not why I’m worried, of course. I’m sure that the Army Corps of Engineers does an excellent job cleaning our water with the machinery they are given. What worries me are the substances the Corps cannot remove from the water without more heavy-duty sanitizing devices. These substances originate upstream, in areas where industries have more of a hold on law enforcement authority.

Those are areas which do not include but are similar to areas around Charleston, West Virginia, where…

Weeks after spilling almost 10,000 gallons of chemicals into West Virginia’s Elk River, chemical maker Freedom Industries filed another toxic leak at their facility in Charleston. Although officials say that none of the chemicals have reached the river. Workers for Freedom Industries hit an underground pipe, unleashing water and the same chemicals that leaked out into the Elk River. The first spill basically contaminating drinking water for almost 300,000 residents. The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection is still not positive about the amount of material spilled into one of the cutoff trenches. The incident occurred around 7pm EST on January 9, 2014. Mike Dorsey responded to the incident stating that “It wasn’t so much of an incident. None of the stuff got into the river.” He describes the spill as a “trickle”. However on that Friday, five schools were reported to have high chemical levels in the water supply…

This thing has gone on long enough, I mean far far too long. It is now what, the 29th day since the spill and still there are traces of 4-methylcyclohexane in the water supplies of innocent West Virginians. This whole thing puzzles me. Why is this even going on? this whole thing shouldn’t have even happened. I mean if this chemical is so toxic why was it kept in a old silo right next to the drinking water of 300,000 Americans. I mean whoever came up with that idea was an idiot, just saying. This situation was so easily preventable. Its ridiculous and I’m destructed. I don’t know what else to say.

I am sad people are not paying much attention to this. I mean I think America should take this as a serious warning. This isn’t just a problem in West Virginia. I mean who knows how many…

2013 was D.C. United’s worst season ever. United tied for the record of the least wins in a season (3), and one of the most ineffective offenses (scoring just 22 goals all season, the same amount as one Vancouver Whitecaps player, Camilo scored in the same time period.)

Appropriately, D.C. is currently in the midst of restructuring of their team, having released or declined the option on seven of their most frustrating players (Lionard Pajoy, Carlos Ruiz, Marcelo Saragosa, Dwayne De Rosario, Syamsir Alam, James Riley and Daniel Woolard) and on one aging veteran who played well but no longer had a place on the team (John Thorrington). They have also made some sensible — if not impressive — signings, picking up Davy Arnaud, Sean Franklin, Nana Attakora and possibly Fabián Espíndola and bringing up a young defender from their academy, Jalen Robinson. Their most exciting signing so far has been…

Frederic Kaplan has found an unconventional way to build a time machine. Rather than making a metal object (or, uh, a police call box) that whisks you through time and space, he wondered: Could a time machine be built out of information?

In today’s TED Talk, filmed at TEDxCaFoscariU, Kaplan previews the Venice Time Machine, a collaboration between Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne and Ca’ Fosari University, to make a geographical and historical simulation of this incredible city, whose past is perhaps the most well-documented in the world. The project is digitizing 80 kilometers of archives to re-create spaces that are now lost to time.

In a similar vein, Google recently opened up its Google Maps Engine, which lets ordinary people add rich data to Google Maps, so that “together we can organize the world’s geospatial information and make it accessible.” Last month, they revealed that…

So one day I sat down and thought “I want crystals. Crystals are cool and pretty to have”. So like any normal person, I went that second and did all the preparations to grow my crystals. So here they are a month later. Aren’t they just beautiful? 🙂

The Colts were down 28 points and they came back and won in the end. Andrew Luck had a terrible first-half. Come second-half, he threw four touchdown passes. The final score was 45-44. This is one of the best comebacks in NFL playoff history.